Scholar alumna goes from Yale and Brown to a gritty school

She never saw blood like that, never witnessed such violence, and when Lillian Hsu came home from school the day her student was beaten, she felt she had made a terrible mistake.

"I told my husband I didn't think I was going to make it," Hsu recalls. "I didn't know how to handle this sort of thing."

The young teacher at Unity High School in Oakland, Calif., had some rough times in the few weeks since she began teaching English at the public charter school in 2003. Breaking up fights, despite her small frame. Trying to impose discipline on the class. Even learning the street language used by the black, Hispanic and American Indian children in her class.

But, on that day, one of her students, a young woman, had been attacked by supporters of a rival gang right in front of the school, on Brann Street in East Oakland. Hsu found her, the student's face covered in blood.

The brutality of the attack shocked the young teacher who had grown up in Edison, attended J.P. Stevens, one of the best high schools in New Jersey, a place where violence like that was unknown.

"I had never seen anything like that," she says.

Hsu, a Star-Ledger Scholar selected in 1998, was graduated from Yale and went on to Brown to earn a master's degree in education. By the time she was hired in Oakland, she was eager to try out what she learned about English, writing and teaching at those Ivy League schools.

"I found out I didn't know very much," she says.

She didn't know about the gangs and the drugs and the violence.

"I had to counsel students whose friends and family members were killed by stray bullets," says Hsu. "I can't believe how naive I was."

The job at Unity seemed perfect when she applied. A start-up charter school, located in a church in a poor, residential neighborhood, funded by a civic group in Oakland. Hsu was living in Washington, D.C., with her husband, Steven Kaye, also from Edison, but he was admitted to the chemistry graduate program at the University of California at Berkeley.

"I wanted to be involved in a school where the teachers were, in fact, the school," says Hsu. "They organized it, they determined what would be taught, set the tone -- and that's what this charter school promised."

She quickly learned little in her Ivy League schooling prepared her. Hsu was anxious from the beginning but, when her student was attacked, she went home and wept. Hsu struggled to get through until Christmas break, when she went home to Edison.

"I had decided I would leave," she said.

And then she thought about it. Some teachers already had left. The school might collapse if she abandoned it, too. Hsu decided she had to stay, at least until the end of the school year.

She sought assistance from one of her own teachers. Star-Ledger Scholars are asked to cite their most influential teacher as part of the program. Hsu honored veteran J.P. Stevens English teacher Carolyn Green -- and honored her again by asking her to help the rookie teacher get through the year.

"Mrs. Green provided me with all kind of ideas, mostly about getting the students to write about their experiences in their neighborhoods," Hsu says.

It was the beginning both of the transformation of the class and of Hsu as a teacher. She used Green's ideas to encourage students to write descriptions of what they saw around them, what they lived through.

"I tore up a lot of what I had brought to Oakland as my proposed curriculum," Hsu says.

She not only got through the first year but decided to return in the fall -- and that, it turned out, represented a major breakthrough with her students.

"You came back," said one of her students. "We didn't think you would."

"I won their trust," she says. "I hadn't abandoned them as many other teachers had done. After that, I knew I was in the right place after all."

Not that she hasn't had problems. One of her best students was arrested for assault and sent to jail. Others have run into problems with immigration authorities. Violence often is still the context in East Oakland.

But the juniors and seniors she teaches at Unity High put together books about the community -- its promise and problems. A restaurant guide. Descriptions of community residents. She and her students make films and podcasts and show them to people in the neighborhood.

Hsu has built an extensive library inside her huge classroom with books donated by people throughout the Bay Area and has raised money for school trips, including one to New York City.

In her classroom, she is enduringly energetic, on occasion literally jumping for joy when her students get a point she's tried to make.

"We get along well," she says.

She wants to stay -- stay in Oakland, stay in teaching, stay with charter schools. More than that, Hsu wants to find a way to encourage other young, bright and energetic people to become teachers in places like East Oakland.